Your sleep schedule is a vital aspect of your overall health. If you don’t get enough sleep, you’re risking your health in a variety of ways.
Not only does the amount of sleep matter, but the quality of sleep is important as well. But how can you measure your quality of sleep? Getting great sleep will transform your day, so it’s about time you learned about different types of sleep and what’s best.Â
What happens when you don’t sleep properly?
Your body needs about 7-9 hours of sleep, depending on your age and health needs, to run properly. If you don’t get this amount, you aren’t letting your body soak in all the benefits of sleep.
Sleep affects nearly every single tissue in your body. It regulates hormones, which play a vital role in mood regulation, growth, and every change that your body goes through. If you don’t sleep enough, you’re risking the equilibrium that your body tries so hard to sustain.
Not only will you feel worse mentally, physically, and emotionally, but you could eventually develop a variety of disorders or diseases.Â
Because sleep replenishes all of your organs and bodily systems, not getting enough sleep can severely affect those things. This is why it’s so important for your health to keep up a proper sleep schedule. But what sleep schedule is best for you?
Monophasic Sleep
Monophasic sleep is the typical sleep schedule of sleeping anywhere from 7-9 hours a night. The amount of sleep typically depends on your age and health needs, but the point is that it’s one continuous phase of sleep.
There are loads of benefits to this form of sleep because of its ability to flow in and out of sleep cycles. The downside is that you might hit a wall in the middle of the day because your scheduled sleeping times are so far apart.Â
Biphasic/Polyphasic Sleep
Biphasic sleep is when you sleep twice a day. Typically this looks like taking a longer nap in the middle of the day and a reduced sleeping time at night.
Polyphasic sleep is where you sleep for more than two periods per day. This is an uncommon form of sleep, but it does the trick when you need it.
Polyphasic sleep could look a few different ways. The most common form of polyphasic sleep is taking multiple quick naps throughout the day with significantly less sleep at night. The key is getting those 20-minute naps in a few times a day.
Pros
There are tons of benefits to polyphasic and biphasic sleep. Many people claim that these forms of sleep help them with their cognition more than monophasic sleep does. It increases productivity, increases memory, and allows you to learn more.
ConsÂ
Polyphasic and biphasic sleep don’t give you all the benefits that you could get with a full-night sleep. If you sleep this way consistently, you aren’t getting through all of your sleep cycles properly.Â
Sleeping in divided segments can lead to great benefits if done correctly, but the issue comes when you consistently wake up in a sleep cycle. If you need an alarm to wake up from your naps, it can be increasingly difficult to complete those sleep cycles.Â
You can have a slower reaction time, lower immunity, mental health issues, and other forms of sleep deprivation issues. This sleep might transform your day, but maybe not in all the ways you would want it to.
So what’s best?
The best sleep schedule is the one where you get not the best quantity of sleep, but the best quality. It turns out, you need a certain amount of sleep for it to be a good quality of sleep!
Prioritizing monophasic sleep will transform your day in so many great ways. However, if you aren’t able to get a full night’s sleep at this point in your life, explore biphasic or polyphasic sleep.Â
These kinds of sleep were designed to sustain you through those more demanding seasons of life. Just make sure you find your way back to monophasic sleep as soon as you can to reap all of those benefits!
